Sir Hercules Robinson

Sir Hercules Robinson (born Dec. 19, 1824, Rosmead, County Westmeath, Ire.—died Oct. 28, 1897, London, Eng.) was a British colonial governor who was high commissioner in South Africa in 1880–89 and 1895–97.

After a brief army career Robinson occupied certain civil service posts connected with the administration of Ireland. He was first posted overseas as president of Montserrat in the West Indies in 1854 and as lieutenant governor of St. Kitts in 1855. Robinson was knighted in 1859 and in 1865, after having administered Hong Kong between 1859 and 1865, was appointed governor of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he vigorously promoted public works, especially road building and irrigation projects. In 1872 he was made governor of the self-governing colony of New South Wales, and he was employed from 1874 to 1875 on special service in connection with the cession of the Fiji Islands to Great Britain.

After a brief term as governor of New Zealand (1879–80), he went to Southern Africa in January 1881 as governor of the Cape Colony and as high commissioner in South Africa. His arrival coincided with the war between the Transvaal and Great Britain.

The Pretoria Convention of August 1881 did not remove the grievances of the Transvaal Boers, and when a Boer deputation went to England in 1883 to obtain a revision of the terms, Robinson was summoned to London for the deliberations that led to the London Convention of February 1884. Robinson was sympathetic to the fears of Cecil John Rhodes, who had entered Cape politics in 1881, that British expansion into Bechuanaland, the road to the north, might be blocked by cooperation between the Transvaal Boers and the Germans who had established a protectorate over South West Africa in 1884. Following the dispatch of an expeditionary force under Sir Charles Warren to Bechuanaland, Britain annexed the territory in 1885. Robinson also gave his blessing to the Moffat treaty (February 1888) with the Ndebele king, Lobengula, which was twisted into signifying Britain’s right to declare a protectorate over Matabeleland, and to the questionable Rudd mineral concession (October 1888) allegedly granted by Lobengula, which became the basis of the operations of Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, chartered in 1889.

Robinson resigned in 1889 and left the Cape for England, but in May 1895 he was called out of retirement by Lord Rosebery’s government to resume his previous post as governor of the Cape Colony and as high commissioner in South Africa. To Rhodes, now prime minister of the Cape, a pliant Robinson, over 70 years old and in ill health, was an acceptable figurehead. Interest in his second term of office centred on the fact that Robinson was high commissioner at the time of the ill-fated Jameson Raid (December 1895) and on his prior knowledge of the plan (which was subsequently suppressed).

Ill health forced him to return to England in May 1896. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Rosmead in August. After returning to the Cape for a brief period, he finally left Southern Africa in April 1897 and died a few months later.